


Noble, Most Ancient

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Series: Notes from the Wizarding World [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:35:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And impossibly screwed up. The tales of the Black family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rehearsal (Bellatrix, Andromeda, Narcissa)

Looking across the great, fantastic expanse of Oxfordshire, they fell to arguing over what it should be used for.

"A battlefield," said Bella, "With armies and goblins and trolls to defeat in the name of Cassiopeia, in the name of Phineas Nigellus!"

"A stage," said Andromeda, "For a romance so remarkable it defies all convention!"

And in fact it became both, for they could not agree, and so they staged a tremendous sisterly fight on it, until Narcissa intervened and played their two games at once, clutching her side and saying in the most tragic whisper, “Dead, my lords. He is dead!”

She only did not want them to fight; they understood this. The art of picking a side was completely foreign to her. But privately both Bellatrix and Andromeda came to agree that Cissy was absolutely  _useless_  in matters of love and battle.


	2. Younger Brother (Regulus, Sirius)

Sirius did not know, because Sirius was not there, how after he left for Hogwarts the house was suffused with a kind of unspoken violence. Callers became sneering and pretentious and did not know their place, referencing that horrible, inappropriate Sorting. Walburga composed Howler after Howler in the study. And Sirius was right: they were not Howlers directed at Regulus _._  But then they did not have to be, because Regulus heard them being composed, and besides this Regulus heard about all the disappointments and the blood traitors and the filth over breakfast each morning. And beyond this there were the mutterings of their cousins, whose love for Sirius seemed to shrivel up and die, and the tight, barely-concealed sense of misfortune in Orion’s washed-out grey eyes, like some calamity had struck Grimmauld Place, which was a place that Sirius had never loved anyway, but which Regulus always  _had_.

Sirius sent him a scarf. Red, like some terrible promise or a joke between them that was not really very funny. And then a clandestine letter came from Andromeda, whom he did not remember very well and who had been burned away in any case, and Regulus had to make Kreacher promise to burn the letter, too, in case Walburga should discover it.

And Alphard began to take him out more and more often, out of some sense of pity, to Diagon and to matches and to the Ministry and to bonfires on the shore where the flames would flicker up and down as though daring a young boy to jump right in, heedless of the consequences. And Regulus would turn away to face the water instead. He would not jump right in, as Sirius had.

He would come to understand something about his brother, in time. He would become just what Sirius longed to be and would be: heedless and daring and a hero. But he would get there in his own way.

He was not Sirius. And he did not want to be.


	3. The Interrupted Voyage (Bellatrix)

Her graduation gift had been a grand tour of those places specifically associated with Grindelwaldian heroics, from the small cafes where he’d first hatched his plans to the ruined husks of the Baltic Ministries he’d destroyed, to the great and glorious city — Chernobog — which he had intended to make the seat of his new magical era.

She’d packed her finest, boasted of it to every girl in the dungeons, and made clandestine plans to meet her fiance in Minsk. Her sisters, she thought, were surprisingly quiet about the whole affair. The youngest was wrapped up in a certain grey-eyed prefect, and clearly the middle one was content to fly in the rear, aware that this was not her moment.

But then perhaps not.

In Paris, only the first stop of the journey, came the Owl urging her to return home.

_Eloped with mudblood filth. Do come back at **once** , you  **must**  make her see sense!_

And for Bella that was that.


	4. Not Me, Said the Snake Girl (Andromeda, Bellatrix)

The Slytherin mind — the mind of a  _true_  Slytherin, one who wants to be in the house, and chooses to be in the house, and one who  _belongs_  there, besides — is not a mind you can cheat. Not really.

Suppose you were to tell it fantastic fairy stories of certain blessed beings who are pure and good and deserve all they have by virtue of their birth, and certain wicked muddy brown things that come in like intruders in the night. Well, one who simply wants to be a Slytherin might believe you, inflamed as they are by a need to be superior, and perhaps also possessed of an adorable childish credulity. Such a being would gladly reduce the world to Mr. Nott’s fables. 

But the truly cunning Slytherin would know better. She would become, after some time, too disillusioned for your bedtime stories.

Suppose you were to demand that the Slytherins line themselves all up in rows, heed the call to arms, show the world their stunning power, lie and cheat and steal and kill in the name of some grand cause, toss away even their freedom to demonstrate that their way — the Slytherin way — is better than all the rest. Those who idolize the house and all it stands for would surely be first in line. But those are not the most Slytherin of Slytherins. Not really. Oh, they want to be. But already they prize house and creed above their own survival, and what sort of snake is that?

Suppose you were to present a Slytherin with one path forward — only one. “Here is the road you must take,” you will say. And it leads to a dank and destructive future, a cold cell in Azkaban, certain death for friend and foe alike. It is as unappealing and as likely to sicken one, as horrible, as those midnight swims in the lake the wild-eyed snake-girl prefects dare to take, protected only by Dark and forbidden magic, desperate to bait and kill a merman in the name of house and home and purest blood.

Oh, but the snake-girl prefects are too wild to be true Slytherins. No true Slytherin would take such a plunge. No true Slytherin would destroy themselves in that manner. Someone who rather likes the  _idea_  of Slytherin would. But not someone who embodies the house. Given only one terrible path, the true Slytherin would not jump headlong into it. She would carve out a second path. This is the way of the cunning survivalist.

And so it is that Andromeda wakes in the night, and remembers being tugged into the lake on a dare, and remembers almost drowning, and remembers the strong-armed Hufflepuff who pulled her out and wrapped her in his coat, and promised not to tell.

And then her sister, her hair sodden and dark, the merman’s skull in one hand, the shiny P on her chest glinting, coming upon her and saying, “Oh, darling, of course I’m sorry. But don’t you see? If we’d drowned, at least we would have drowned _together_.”

"Not me," Andromeda had said. "You drown. Not me."


	5. Delicious (Sirius, Regulus)

Here was a delicious day. That was how they described it at the time:  _delicious_. 

An Uncle had come to free them from the confines of their very dreary family lessons. He brought his pup, a large and black and friendly thing that they both adored. He took them to a spot near a river, in some magic-lit section of the city, and there they rode a carousel where all the animals came alive and talked to them as they whirled around and around.

A brief spat marred the perfect day. Was the better animal the very solid lion which would not leap about? One youth — named for lions — said it was, because it was steadfast and true, and besides this it gave one no fright to ride such a majestic creature, fixed and steady on his pole. The lion licked him in thanks.

The other boy preferred the moving animals. He said that no, no; better to choose the snapping wolf, or, naturally, the snake. But the snake had a bite. This settled the argument. And rather put the older boy off of snakes for the very first time. Not the last.

Soothing ice cream followed, pumpkin flavored for one and for the other chocolate with caramel sauce. They walked along the river, and came on some children sledding — children who were ordinary and forbidden and therefore exciting — and begged their Uncle if they could join in. They could. The ordinary children asked: were they wearing costumes? 

It was a funny question. They laughed and laughed. They didn’t notice the spells their uncle cast afterwards, to make the ordinary children forget, to make the memory slide away. They didn’t realize, young as they were, that memories could do that, that memories are silvery and insubstantial by nature.

When they returned, a beautiful cousin, her eyes as blue as the river (which was so blue on that day, blue as the sky, so perfect they swore they’d never forget it), asked them what kind of day they’d had. And they said, unselfconsciously, without a trace of that embarrassment that comes upon older boys caught using posh accents and silly baby terms, that it was a  _delicious_  one. 

But the younger boy did forget, perhaps because he had a weak mind, or perhaps simply because he’d been very young at the time. The older one did not — not the animals and their lessons, not the ordinary children, not the kindness of the Uncle, not the blueness of the river.

Not until he should face the Dementors, who came with gaping maws and cloaks fluttering open to show their empty black hunger. They took the delicious memories first.

 


	6. Disturbance (Sirius)

In the back of the room, lounging and grinning, handsome as could be, was the great Class Disturbance, who already knew everything there was to know about History of Magic, who had very little appreciation for the topic, and who could therefore devote the hour to barbs and interruptions.

Barbs were his chief talent. He could hook you with a word. If Pucey should say something stupid in Transfigurations (a class he liked and always behaved himself in), he would come forward at this time to echo perfectly, word-for-word, the simpleminded statement in an exaggerated mimicry of her ridiculous country accent, so that Binns responded without turning around or pausing in his lesson, “That’s a silly question, Miss Puceski,” and all the class fell to laughing at the unfortunate.

He would make a roll of parchment stretch itself out and begin to choke Avery, when Avery began to behave as though he and his sort knew all the answers, as though he was recording them there with his ostentatious peacock-feather quill. 

He would take tall, masculine, fashionable Mulciber — wearing the maroon cravat and insignia of his noble house — and reduce him to a show, an overdressed bully, a pampered and pathetic prince in the pink robes of your standard pureblood poodle.

He could even drive Mary and Minnie and Marlene — kind, unobtrusive girls; not at all at the level of his usual targets — to tears. But that was on bad days.

It was not quite understood why the Class Disturbance behaved in this way. He was supposed to be a model for the rest, well-born and handsome and favored, far above them and genteel about it. He was supposed to have been raised properly. He was not supposed to be cruel, horrible, disruptive. 

His House Head, who liked him, who saw his good qualities, but who could not condone such behavior, brought him in one day and had him explain the matter. And he could not explain himself, not really. He was clever and handsome, but he lacked that inward brilliance that we call self-knowledge; he was too much a child to level criticism at  _himself_.

He could only force out, eventually, in furious tones, the many simple and stupid and awful thoughts he’d been forced to swallow unquestioningly (always posed in that ridiculous highbrow London accent) and also how horribly his mother had grimaced, long ago, when he’d suggested to her that she might not know all the answers; and the robes, sweet Merlin, those bloody  _robes_. Those girlish, traditional, elf-sewn straightjackets, with no hint of Muggle filth about them: the uniforms of a proper pureblood son, a son Walburga might have found some worth in.


	7. Future Leaders (Sirius, Regulus)

The future leaders of the world were examining their new toy broomsticks in the playroom. And though they had only the barest hint of adulthood about them — round cheeks instead of Papa’s sharp angles, smudged fingernails instead of strong, long-fingered, wand-carrying hands — one could already see them in the halls of the Ministry, standing tall, handsome, and immovable: groomed for this position, these pups with their clear eyes and the barest hint of fangs.

A delight to behold this vision, here in the paneled playroom.

Yes, even Baby was a delight. Baby was a little slower than the rest, a bit less handsome than his brother. But what a sweet, steady Baby. Loyal, silly Baby, left mostly to the house elf’s care as he could be bothersome in that way babies often are, so worrying to Mama, who believed him likely to toddle out of windows when one wasn’t looking, or into London drains or holes or caves, or pits in the garden, or streets full of Muggles. But Baby was loving and good, adoring of his bright-eyed brother. Sure to fall in line and do what was expected of him, to never betray his betters for someone low. What a remarkable lieutenant he would make! 

And the General! This was Papa’s name for him, said in a vague way, as though he were not sure Mama approved (one had to run everything by Mama): the  _General_. Generally cleverer than other boys his age, and generally handsomer. The General, developing harebrained schemes to make their pretty cousins eat terrible, tongue-melting toffees, and shouting rudely at the Minister when he came for tea, as though he had no fear for Mama’s ensuing wrath. The General had no fear of anything. What a marvelous leader he would be; what a credit, once Slytherin tempered his rebelliousness a bit.

And there, swiping the broomsticks from them both as they protested in vain, stood a distant cousin, Commander of the lot. Already a dab hand, said his father in an undertone to Mama and Papa, at peculiar curses to rip the skin from lizards and make spiders explode. But he was not barbaric. He was a wise, far-seeing little fellow to people, to his own kind. So solicitous of Mama and Papa and other older wizards. So full of sunny smiles before the Minister and his Ministry men. Such a good example, so adept at making himself ringleader, at making the others fall in line. Surely the greatest child of his generation.

Why, even the General seemed subdued when he was about, if a bit surly, a bit distrustful of his Commander (as young, wild pups could be, before they were civilized a bit, tamed, reared up to suit their breeding). What a feat, to subdue the General!

Mama and Papa and Father were sure these were to be the future leaders of the world. Already, they were pouring galleons into many a Ministry coffer to make it so, posting amenable puppet persons to the Board of Governors, affixing hopes to Slytherin; so delightful, so wondrous was this vision of their three sons ruling the Ministry, heading the Army — what army? Who knew? Abraxas had some vague plans and a shadowy figure whose name he tossed about, and if this shadow-person should have goals that corresponded to theirs, goals that might be fitting for the future leaders of the world — then perhaps. Perhaps that army.

They would naturally lead it, for a child like the Commander could not be expected to bend at the knee to some half-blood Abraxas kept in the shadows.

"How silly we are, worrying over them like this, when anyone can see they are perfectly fine," said Walburga, turning away, oblivious, as the Commander began poking Baby with a broomstick. "Kreacher ought to have brought out the tea by now. Come."

"Leave him alone!" shouted the General as they departed. This did not alarm them. The General was always shouting things.

"Or what?" said Mulciber the Commander. "Or  _what_?”

Oh, how easy it is to see, in formless Baby cheeks and small, nudging hands; in cowlicks and uneven children’s teeth; and in those small, unsure steps they take, haltingly, on their paths to the future; precisely what lies in wait for our next, most beloved generation. As we place Professors here and Governors there, shower them with toys and lessons and civilization, they are moving forward, on their own, into places we never quite expected, as if to spite us.


	8. I Do (Bellatrix)

No fine old halls for the Lestrange wedding, and no great party of guests, and no white train for the bride, and no rest from his duty for the groom. Only wands at the ready and the house-elves put to work and the old house made to suit and everyone’s robes very starched and dark and functional, with perhaps a few concessions to Aunt Walburga, who cried out that this was not the way young women of their family did things.

But the bride was as much a warrior as a young woman, and far more interested in the Cause than in things like invitations and old relations and romance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Save that shit for the Malfoy wedding.


	9. Heart (Andromeda)

Andromeda, though proud to be a Slytherin, nonetheless had some reservations. Her very long first year had produced not any great pride or ambition, but instead a general uneasiness. There was so much cheating, and jeering, and sneering; and such little greatness, which came of something more than sneering and jeering. So few of her house-mates noticed. But Andromeda, peering out from her older sister’s shadow, couldn’t help but see it. How all the rest of the school — even her kind Hufflepuff potions partner — believed they were heartless, and with good reason. But they weren’t heartless, were they?

"My darling," said her Uncle very somberly, "What is my star?"

She could not quite see what that had to do with anything, but she dutifully answered, “Well, it’s the heart of the serpent, I suppose.”

"You see?" Uncle Alphard said, "Proof that we serpents have one. Find yours. There is no nobler ambition than that."


	10. Surely Too Young (Narcissa)

Druella’s sister-in-law, whose opinions were razor-sharp and loudly-expressed and often negative, insisted that the family’s neighbors (those trumped-up peacocks who lived just over the Wiltshire border) were nowhere near as pure as they said they were. What’s more, Walburga insisted, they would die if it meant snaring a Black girl for marriage and motherhood. And so she hoped that Cygnus’s dreamy little wife stayed vigilant, for the sake of Bellatrix and Andromeda and dear little Narcissa.

But Walburga did not accompany them on that fateful seaside outing. And Abraxas and Lukasta hailed them so charmingly.

Besides, surely their Lucius was too young to take an interest.


	11. Not Quite, Alice (Andromeda)

Kindhearted Alice alone accepted her. Ted’s new girl. This slim, self-assured creature — their schoolmate for seven years, and yet still somehow untrustworthy. Somehow the kind of person light-years away, not a friendly fellow badger but one of those girls hidden away in dungeons and drawing rooms, set on the shelf and waited on hand and foot until some suitable pure-blood should appear to marry her, a creature somehow delicate and venomous all at once.

But Alice liked her. She liked to hear her talk of her family, she liked how she seemed to miss them (“What do you expect?” she told Amelia, “If Andy hated her family as much as you think she should, then she really  _would_  be a little snake, wouldn’t she?”), and only-child Alice even liked the thought of these delicate, beautiful star sisters.

"I had someone clever and brilliantly fun there, always," Andromeda said, "And someone willing to go to the most tremendous lengths to achieve our goals. It’s a kind of loyalty and dedication with her. It isn’t all that different from a Hufflepuff’s, really."

"Well, Bella can’t be all bad," Alice replied, "I’m sure I’d like her if I knew her."


	12. Ted (Andromeda)

If you thought he was slavish because he was a duffer, then you’d be wrong. He was not. He was not a servant to his passions or to his name or to blood or even to friendship. He was not like the hounds on the family coat of arms, ready to snap and tear flesh in the name of loyalty, arrogant hunters bred for generations to claw and bite, and for what? For a cause (Bella), for the family name (Aunt Walburga), for a fiance (Cissy), for rodentlike schoolmates who weren’t worth the parchment their Hogwarts letters had been printed on (young Sirius), even for their bloody house-elves.

Sometimes she thought with despair that they were all, the whole lot of them, doomed to course across life as recklessly and single-mindedly as slavish dogs, all in the name of some misguided loyalty.

But Ted thought that life didn’t have to be like that. You could be reasoned and honest and just. You could find something worth being loyal to. And it didn’t have to demand mindless, unthinking devotion. Just love.

"For example, you," he said, "You."


	13. Shattered (Bellatrix)

It was easy for sordid biographers in search of titillating topics to focus on the stunning beauty she’d been before Voldemort’s first defeat. They would then wax poetic on dissipated morals and the last vestiges of royal good looks and conclude that here was a fallen woman. But of course the woman herself would not have cared about any of that.

It was easy to point out that the death of that brilliant raven-haired society girl, that well-born political dilettante, occurred long before the fateful Battle of Hogwarts, when, as one salivating writer put it, “a fanatic arose from the ashes of her shattered beauty.” But the truth was that it had nothing to do with her beauty. Bellatrix’s faculties were gone. That was all.

 


	14. Star Girls (Andromeda, Bellatrix, Narcissa)

There were three sisters: constant and clever and united, well-born and wealthy and beloved, beautiful and powerful and sparkling as the stars. And what spells they might have worked! From birth, their stars suggested they might make a marvelous coven.

Oh, but what if one of the star-girls should find love? And another power? And the third both, or neither, or something greater still: it hardly even matters; as to star-girls love and power are so similar, whether we speak of worshipful ideology or principled adoration. Oh, so much for being constant and united and star-bright. So much for the star-girls, who might have been the leaders of the age, if only their courses had been fixed, not chosen.


	15. Brighter (Andromeda, Sirius)

Once, the house was neither grim nor old. Its children were dutiful as such small snakes can be. Its sons were powerful, dark, and handsome. A succession of grey-eyed star girls, each more beautiful than the last, glittered from their posts in the garden, in the library, in the portraits, in the drawing room: Lyra, Elladora, Cassiopeia, Walburga, Bella. Then the second-to-last star girl came of age, and fell in love; and the second-to-last star son came to value friendship more than darkness and power; and the house turned against itself, becoming grim and dark.

But the world outside shone a little bit brighter.


End file.
